Nice Italy

Tragic, horrific, disturbing, dangerous…these are just some of the words that came to mind as the news circulated about the ambush murders of three police officers on Sunday. The situation in America regarding law enforcement and the media storyline is getting worse with every news cycle. Over the past two weeks, five officers murdered in Dallas, a terror attack in Nice and three officers murdered in Baton Rouge. The President has stepped up to the microphone each time to deliver a reaction to the events. Instead of offering the words necessary to calm a nation and inspire confidence and solutions, in each case he made it political. Guess he really took former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s words to heart about never letting a good crisis go to waste.

Sad, disgusting, inappropriate, dangerous. These are the words that came to mind as I watched the President deliver his remarks yesterday. His focus was on political rhetoric and divisive speech. He wants the American people to believe that there are two equal sides at play here. On one side, people with legitimate grievances against the police and on the other the need to keep law enforcement officers safe. The problem is that the sides are not equal. To raise an incident that resulted in a man’s death during an arrest to the level of an assassination of officers responding to a 911 call is inaccurate, disingenuous and wrong.